Gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown checks in with poll workers before voting at Oakland Fire Station No. 6 on Tuesday.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

Gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown checks in with poll workers...

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Republican California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, right, thanks her supporters at the Pasadena Republican headquarters in Pasadena, Calif. on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010. The former CEO of eBay poured more than $150 million of her own money into the campaign, making it the most expensive non presidential race in the nation's history.

Photo: Damian Dovarganes, AP

Republican California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, right,...

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Mark Abboud smiles at gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown after the two voted next to each other at Oakland Fire Station No. 6 on Tuesday. Abboud says he is a proud supporter of Brown and mentioned that his grandfather voted for Brown's father.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown - defying both a crushing conservative wave sweeping the nation and a tsunami of spending by his billionaire opponent - handily beat eBay CEO Meg Whitman Tuesday, a historic win that returns the 72-year-old Democrat to the post he held nearly three decades ago as California's chief executive.

"It looks like I'm going back again," said the state attorney general speaking to a crowd of thousands of excited Democrats at the historic Fox Theater in Oakland - the city he led as mayor for two terms and where he still resides. "They haven't got all the votes in, but hell - it's good enough for government work," he joked to laughs, shortly after 11 p.m.

Brown called for an end to the "polarization, hostility, division," that has defined state politics in recent years. "I still carry with me that missionary zeal to kind of transform the world," the former Jesuit seminarian said, adding that "I'm hoping and I'm praying that this breakdown - that's gone on for so many years - paves the way for a breakthrough."

"I take as my challenge a forging of a common purpose ... based on a vision of what California can be," said Brown, the son of the late Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown. He said he will now go back to the post he held "28 eight years later, full of energy, full of creativity - and ready to serve you, the people of California."

After watching their party's pummeling in most of the rest of the nation, Democrats cheered victories by Brown - and incumbent U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer - as a welcome sign of the blue-leaning state's resistance to Tea Party anger and a GOP tide that swept Democrats and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco out of power in the House of Representatives.

"If there's any one thing you can say about what happened here, it's that Democrats came home," said Wade Randlett, the powerhouse Silicon Valley Democratic Party fundraiser. "They said we wouldn't show up at the polls ... (but) they looked at the candidates and said, 'I will vote for the individuals who I think are right to represent me in California.' "

Brown beat back the national conservative wave with a message that "I will be a frugal governor who will make hard decisions, who won't tax people without their approval," Randlett said. "It was a moderate, centrist message" that exit polls show played especially well with Latinos and women voters in California

The latest quirky development in California politics means that Brown - whose election to the statehouse job in 1974 made him one of the youngest governors in state history - will now be the nation's oldest governor. The man he will succeed, GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was starring in "Conan the Barbarian" when Brown was finishing up his second term in 1982.

Brown's win also marks a rare third term for a governor of California - one legally allowed because term limits were not passed until 1990, after he left office.

In Los Angeles, the GOP gathering for Whitman appeared over before it even started, as those assembling at the Universal Hilton heard dour reports that Fox News and the Los Angeles Times had already called the election for Brown and Boxer.

Just hours before, Whitman's $90,000-a-month political consultant Mike Murphy was insisting to MSNBC that there would be an "upset" and contending that polls hadn't yet tracked a late GOP "surge."

Republicans at Whitman's gathering waited for hours without word until the former CEO delivered a short address to her supporters urging unity just before midnight - after she made a call to Brown to concede defeat.

"It is now time for California to unite behind the common cause of turning around the state that we love," she said. "This election was much bigger than Gov. Brown or me ... our challenges are daunting, and they won't be solved by politics as usual. ... It is my hope that a new era of bipartisan problem solving can begin tonight."

She said "the journey is ending, but our mission is not."

"We did not achieve the victory we worked so hard for," she said. But "if we all work together to demand change a new California will rise."

Former GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon - another wealthy self-funded candidate who failed in his quest - said that after Tuesday's results, "I really don't know what the answer is for Republicans in California."

"I thought coming into tonight that it was going to be close - and I was hoping that the Republican fervor elsewhere in the country could carry us over tonight," Simon said. "But it didn't happen."

The widely expected win of Brown, who was up double digits over Whitman in the latest Field Poll - and who in early returns appeared to be leading a strong Democratic ticket of winning candidates - confirmed that the 2.3 million Democratic voter-advantage over Republicans in California provided a strong cushion against Tuesday's national political trend.

Brown's victory will return the California statehouse to a Democrat for the first time since 2003 - when Gov. Gray Davis was recalled and Schwarzenegger was elected.

Brown, in his 2010 race to win a third term, said he was more conservative, more seasoned and more pragmatic than in his earlier years. He celebrated both his independence from political consultants and his frugality as an asset, and ran a shoestring campaign, spending $1 for every $6 spent by Whitman in the most expensive non-presidential contest in U.S. history.

Whitman, in the last campaign expenditure reports filed Oct. 16, burned through $160 million total, $142 million of her own money - numbers that were expected to rise in final counts. Brown, in the same period, spent barely $25 million, the secretary of state's records show, though he was aided by $26.5 million in independent expenditures from union and labor supporters.

Though Whitman, who backed Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain in their 2008 presidential runs, was a newcomer to politics and an infrequent voter, Republicans eagerly welcomed the wealthy self-funded candidate as a job creator and business leader who would ride a wave of voter anger at the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Lines were drawn early in the race, pitting Brown, with 40 years of experience and a lineage in state politics, against the former CEO, who argued she was an outsider who could "run California like a business" to get the state out of its fiscal mess.

Brown, decried as a tax-and-spend liberal "relic" by Republicans, argued that his decades of experience made him the best candidate to deliver California from crisis; he took centrist, pragmatic positions, favoring greater local control and no new taxes without voters' approval.